NAME

DESCRIPTION

A user authentication and authorisation framework plugin for Dancer apps.

Makes it easy to require a user to be logged in to access certain routes, provides role-based access control, and supports various authentication methods/sources (config file, database, Unix system users, etc).

Designed to support multiple authentication realms and to be as extensible as possible, and to make secure password handling easy. The base class for auth providers makes handling RFC2307-style hashed passwords really simple, so you have no excuse for storing plain-text passwords. A simple script to generate RFC2307-style hashed passwords is included, or you can use Crypt::SaltedHash yourself to do so, or use the slappasswd utility if you have it installed.

SYNOPSIS

Configure the plugin to use the authentication provider class you wish to use:

AUTHENTICATION PROVIDERS

For flexibility, this authentication framework uses simple authentication provider classes, which implement a simple interface and do whatever is required to authenticate a user against the chosen source of authentication.

CONTROLLING ACCESS TO ROUTES

Keywords are provided to check if a user is logged in / has appropriate roles.

require_login - require the user to be logged in

get '/dashboard' => require_login sub { .... };

If the user is not logged in, they will be redirected to the login page URL to log in. The default URL is /login - this may be changed with the login_page option.

require_role - require the user to have a specified role

get '/beer' => require_role BeerDrinker => sub { ... };

Requires that the user be logged in as a user who has the specified role. If the user is not logged in, they will be redirected to the login page URL. If they are logged in, but do not have the required role, they will be redirected to the access denied URL.

Requires that the user be logged in as a user who has any one (or more) of the roles listed. If the user is not logged in, they will be redirected to the login page URL. If they are logged in, but do not have any of the specified roles, they will be redirected to the access denied URL.

require_all_roles - require the user to have all roles listed

get '/foo' => require_all_roles [qw(Foo Bar)] => sub { ... };

Requires that the user be logged in as a user who has all of the roles listed. If the user is not logged in, they will be redirected to the login page URL. If they are logged in but do not have all of the specified roles, they will be redirected to the access denied URL.

Replacing the Default /login and /login/denied Routes

By default, the plugin adds a route to present a simple login form at that URL. If you would rather add your own, set the no_default_pages setting to a true value, and define your own route which responds to /login with a login page. Alternatively you can let DPAE add the routes and handle the status codes, etc. and simply define the setting login_page_handler and/or permission_denied_page_handler with the name of a subroutine to be called to handle the route. Note that it must be a fully qualified sub. E.g.

If the user is logged in, but tries to access a route which requires a specific role they don't have, they will be redirected to the "permission denied" page URL, which defaults to /login/denied but may be changed using the denied_page option.

Again, by default a route is added to respond to that URL with a default page; again, you can disable this by setting no_default_pages and creating your own.

This would still leave the routes post '/login' and any '/logout' routes in place. To disable them too, set the option no_login_handler to a true value. In this case, these routes should be defined by the user, and should do at least the following:

If you want to use the default post '/login' and any '/logout' routes you can configure them. See below.

Keywords

require_login

Used to wrap a route which requires a user to be logged in order to access it.

get '/secret' => require_login sub { .... };

require_role

Used to wrap a route which requires a user to be logged in as a user with the specified role in order to access it.

get '/beer' => require_role BeerDrinker => sub { ... };

You can also provide a regular expression, if you need to match the role using a regex - for example:

get '/beer' => require_role qr/Drinker$/ => sub { ... };

require_any_role

Used to wrap a route which requires a user to be logged in as a user with any one (or more) of the specified roles in order to access it.

get '/foo' => require_any_role [qw(Foo Bar)] => sub { ... };

require_all_roles

Used to wrap a route which requires a user to be logged in as a user with all of the roles listed in order to access it.

get '/foo' => require_all_roles [qw(Foo Bar)] => sub { ... };

logged_in_user

Returns a hashref of details of the currently logged-in user, if there is one.

The details you get back will depend upon the authentication provider in use.

user_has_role

Check if a user has the role named.

By default, the currently-logged-in user will be checked, so you need only name the role you're looking for:

if (user_has_role('BeerDrinker')) { pour_beer(); }

You can also provide the username to check;

if (user_has_role($user, $role)) { .... }

user_roles

Returns a list of the roles of a user.

By default, roles for the currently-logged-in user will be checked; alternatively, you may supply a username to check.

Returns a list or arrayref depending on context.

authenticate_user

Usually you'll want to let the built-in login handling code deal with authenticating users, but in case you need to do it yourself, this keyword accepts a username and password, and optionally a specific realm, and checks whether the username and password are valid.

For example:

if (authenticate_user($username, $password)) {
...
}

If you are using multiple authentication realms, by default each realm will be consulted in turn. If you only wish to check one of them (for instance, you're authenticating an admin user, and there's only one realm which applies to them), you can supply the realm as an optional third parameter.

SAMPLE CONFIGURATION

In your application's configuation file:

session: simple
plugins:
Auth::Extensible:
# Set to 1 if you want to disable the use of roles (0 is default)
disable_roles: 0
# After /login: If no return_url is given: land here ('/' is default)
user_home_page: '/user'
# After /logout: If no return_url is given: land here (no default)
exit_page: '/'
# List each authentication realm, with the provider to use and the
# provider-specific settings (see the documentation for the provider
# you wish to use)
realms:
realm_one:
provider: Database
db_connection_name: 'foo'

Please note that you must have a session provider configured. The authentication framework requires sessions in order to track information about the currently logged in user. Please see Dancer::Session for information on how to configure session management within your application.

AUTHOR

David Precious, <davidp at preshweb.co.uk>

BUGS / FEATURE REQUESTS

This is an early version; there may still be bugs present or features missing.

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